By Tanuja Adiani, Managing Director, and Tamas Mark, Global Head of Real Assets
In the world of business, cash is king. But times are changing, and there is a new contender for that title: data.
The ability to collate, clean and access financial and qualitative data has become the edge that separates the early bird from the followers. The development of artificial intelligence (AI), including large language models (LLMs), means there is virtually no ceiling to how information can be analysed, automated and manipulated. The potential to revolutionise how businesses operate is limited primarily by their access to and application of reliable data.
This is especially true in real estate investment and management, where IQ-EQ has been driving the adoption of smart data analytics tools over the past six years. We’ve supported clients eager to unlock efficiency and cost-saving benefits. Our motivation is simple: as with any technological innovation, companies that don’t invest risk falling behind.
Making sense of data
IQ-EQ’s clients include commercial real estate (CRE) investment and asset managers with thousands of tenants and millions of data points spanning multi-family residential, retail, industrial, office, and data centres. Clients also include diversified multi-strategy managers who require comparative metrics across private credit, private equity and real estate business lines.
These investors frequently report a common set of data-related challenges:
- Time consuming, inconsistent, error-prone data extraction from financial documents and databases
- Trouble reconciling data across different asset classes to generate like-for-like comparisons
- Revenue losses due to poor visibility into tenant churn
- Limited ability to drill down to source data including documents and contracts for potential risks and liabilities
- Challenges maintaining records for meeting minutes and audits
To produce usable data, fund managers effectively need a translator – one that can standardise and compare the details that form risk profiles, investment returns, and KPI metrics.
Looking into the kitchen
LPs and GPs alike demand – and deserve – transparency. With IQ-EQ’s workflow tools and dashboards, they gain access to every step of the process and a clear view of what’s happening and when. In essence, we’re inviting them into the kitchen.
For example, with our workflow tool, IQ-EQ Navigator, clients can track the status of financial statement preparation and align it with statutory and investor reporting deadlines.
Likewise, our portfolio dashboards in IQ-EQ Cosmos offer a level of granularity that was unheard of just a few years ago. Operators and investors can drill down by country and even region to see how assets are performing and how valuations are trending.
With just a few clicks, they can also analyse individual tenant performance across their portfolio. This is a powerful tool we developed during the Covid-19 pandemic; it allows managers to monitor in near real-time how trends like remote working were impacting tenancy rates.
Single source of truth
We’ve seen firsthand how much time is lost trying to reconcile disparate data sets. Consider a fund manager with thousands of commercial real estate assets – how can their investors compare apples to apples to determine which asset class is delivering the best returns, or analyse other vital metrics?
There must be a single source of truth that all stakeholders can trust.
Smart data tools are delivering exactly that. At IQ-EQ, around 200 professionals are dedicated to technological innovation. They’re rolling out increasingly ambitious platform improvements at an accelerated pace.
Fund managers can now retrieve a data point (or an entire document) on request and use built-in tools to analyse its contents.
These innovations streamline both reporting and operations across real estate holdings, freeing professionals to work on strategic projects.
Our platform integrates several types of LLMs. For example:
- Extraction AI pulls data from documents and restructures it into formats usable for fund managers. This includes document processing and data scraping
- Sentiment AI analyses client communications to identify sentiment drivers and highlight pain points
Shortly, we expect to offer performance benchmarks based on our vast data pools. We’ll also provide predictive forecasts and scenario modelling tools. Cash management will be automated so that rental income is recorded seamlessly, eliminating the need for manual checks by multiple internal teams.
Embracing technology
Crucially, dashboards will continue to improve in both usability and visual design. They will become more intuitive, allowing users to search for, view and collate data with ease.
These tools are beneficial for managers of all sizes. For instance, emerging managers with one or two funds often need to demonstrate performance history. Rather than build a bespoke data infrastructure from scratch, they can simply tell us what insights they need, and we show them how to access it.
As we embrace increasingly advanced AI tools, it’s tempting to assume that human involvement is becoming obsolete, but that’s not the case. Beyond the innately human ability to nurture trust and deliver emotionally intelligent service, we also still need people to verify accuracy, investigate red flags raised by our screening tools, and respond to events that AI hasn’t been trained to anticipate – like a sudden imposition of tariffs by the U.S. on key trading partners!
The technology is ready. The professionals are standing by to deploy tools and expertise to deliver the data. Now it’s time to make the most of it.
For more information on IQ-EQ’s tech tools and how we can support real estate managers, please don’t hesitate to contact us:
